The patent application RU2093833 refers to a method to predict pathological changes in brain and spinal cord of infants and young children through a neurosonography. In order to obtain said neurosonography at least an ultrasound sensor is placed in a defected bone in the spine or in the fontanelle of an infant. This sensor operates at one of the following frequencies of 3.5, 5.0, 7.5 MHz. In particular, the method described by RU2093833 comprises scanning the cerebrospinal fluid and determining the protein level. When the protein level increases, the viscosity of the cerebrospinal fluid varies. Due to this fluid variation, the protein level in the cerebrospinal fluid can be detected. When the protein content in the CSF is higher than 0.8 g/L, it indicates a pathological change as meningitis or encephalitis. The method is based on density/viscosity changes of the CSF due to increased protein levels as an indication of infection or inflammation; this is a low sensitive cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) parameter to meningitis. Additionally, this method requires of some invasive procedures to the body to obtain an accurate measurement.
The patent application RU2189782 discloses a method for predicting development of bacterial purulent meningitis in children of early age. In particular this method analyses the parameters of neurosonographic images of patients taken during the first week of the disease. These images are taken in the fissure between the hemispheres, in order to obtain the echogenicity and echogenic structure of the brain for predicting neurologic injuries. The method predicts purulent meningitis by means of assessing structural changes that occur in the disease at a later stage. Thus, the present method does not allow an early meningeal infection diagnosis when the CSF is not yet purulent, and an accurate CSF cellulality change neither, which is the parameter most used to track patient's response to treatment.
The international patent application WO2006055449 refers to a system and a method for ultrasonic measuring of the properties of a variety of particles or cells in a suspension. Those properties are, for example, velocity of particles, concentration and/or size. In order to measure these properties an acoustic energy is introduced to a focal zone and a narrow band interrogating signals is used. The acoustic energy may cause movement or streaming of the fluid or suspension. The acoustic streaming may allow a Doppler effect measurement, without any other source, of velocity. This patent application also describes the use of ultrasonic backscatter to characterize concentration, particle size, and viscosity of the suspension. Also this ultrasonic backscatter time-domain signals may be converted by a Fast Fourier Transform (“FFT”) algorithm to a high-resolution, narrow-band power spectrum, the shape of which provides the information about the particle suspension. The patent claims a method directing an ultrasonic single frequency tone burst of at least 10 cycles. Such long signals reduce the ability of the system to resolve individual cells subjecting concentration measurements to normalization/characterization of the backscattered signal to a background or reference signal. This normalization is impractical in vivo for each patient because the different attenuation of the skin in each patient made a previous reference, obtained in vitro or from other patients, invalid.
The international patent application WO2009052481 discloses an optical coherence tomography cell detection system. In particular, the objective of this invention is imaging blood flow using magneto-motive optical Doppler tomography (MMODT), Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), or Ultrasound. At least one of these methods is directed into the body of the patient and red blood cells, which are suspended in the blood plasma, scatter the ultrasonic energy back towards a receiver/transducer that converts the back-scattered ultrasonic energy into an electrical signal that is processed in some known manner to determine the presence of a flow and an estimate of the flow velocity. However, this method requires high-concentration of red blood cells to be sensitive to backscatter signal shifts. With such high concentration of cells, ultrasound frequencies in the range of 5-10 MHz are generally needed.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have methods and processes that do not suffer from one or more of the above drawbacks.